Comment by ryan29 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryan29 | Hacker News Reader

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Every time I see one of these roll out with dots allowed in the username [1], I wonder what they’re thinking. YouTube just made that (IMO) mistake with their new handles and now Discord is doing the same.

I think it’s a mistake because using validated domains as handles makes sense to me. Even if it’s not a requirement, giving businesses and large influencers the option of using a domain as a handle has benefits. Reducing impersonation is one of those benefits and, subjectively, Discord is frequently a component in impersonation scams.

Even if you don’t want domains as handles right now, why wouldn’t you keep the option available by forbidding dots in usernames, especially since Bluesky is getting a lot of hype and they’re using domains as handles? If Bluesky catches on, impersonation using handles that look like domains will become an issue for platforms like YouTube and Discord because they aren’t paying enough attention.

Or is in intentional? Domain validated handles are amazing for small businesses trying to create a consistent experience (across services) for their users, so maybe that’s the whole point. Allowing bad actors to impersonate domains reduces the value of domains which makes users more dependent on platform based verification solutions that don’t double as an advertisement for your website (that you control).

What are the upsides to allowing dots in a username or handle? I don’t see any that outweigh the downsides.

1. https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/12620128861463...

Because outside of HN users, people do not want domains as handles and the feature is actively dangerous. What happens when you forget to renew your domain? The bot that grabs it gets to take over your account or handle?

Its far too complex and expensive for normal users. And businesses don't communicate officially on discord outside of their own server where they are specially tagged.

> Because outside of HN users, people do not want domains as handles and the feature is actively dangerous.

HN is frequently ahead of the curve in terms of trends, so it’s not shocking if most people don’t understand the value until they see someone else getting that value out of a new strategy.

In terms of it being dangerous, I don’t agree. I think having everyone associate me, my brand, my business, etc. with my domain name reduces the risk of being de-platformed because anyone that wants to can easily find me via my universal handle (aka domain) regardless of the platform. I’ll gladly take on the risk of having to remember to renew my domain name as a trade off for the added protections I get via the dispute resolution processes for domains.

> What happens when you forget to renew your domain? The bot that grabs it gets to take over your account or handle?

No. Expired domains have a well defined post-expiration lifecycle that makes it difficult to lose a domain unintentionally . If you don’t notice everything you use being broken for a month, it can’t be that important, right? Yeah, you’d lose the handle, but the account ID is typically immutable and used as a source of truth, so it wouldn’t give a new domain owner the ability to hijack your account.

Any minute now the average user is going to realise that Dropbox is useless, you can just use ftp, and that the MacBook sucks and we should all switch to corebooted thinkpads.

> Any minute now the average user is going to realise that Dropbox is useless, you can just use ftp

I really don’t understand the harm in having more options. Would you say we should never consider anything but Dropbox because it works fine for the average user? What about someone with >250k files which tends to be what all of those sync platforms recommend as the max number of files you should try to keep in sync?

I don't think that was the point. The point was that the majority of people like convenient things, but a small subset of users on here like complicated, old and hacky things.

2023 is clearly the year of desktop Linux.

Personally I would like to separate business and private me. It is inexplicable to me to not prefer the freedom of anonymity for anything private.

Sure, for business needs that might be adequate, but I don't use Discord for anything professional. Naturally I wouldn't want either my domain or that of my business associated with my Discord account. On the contrary, if there was an association, it would induce a moderate to heavy panic. I don't even do that for private development that I publish.

An ephemeral ID also provides many advantages, especially in these time where everyone and their dog wants to erect walls on the net. I don't want a safe net®. A safe net is for people that are scared. People that are scared are scary. Far more than the average scammer and an associated ID would even expose you to more dangerous ID theft just because you know are a more interesting target.

> HN is frequently ahead of the curve in terms of trends

When’s that? Last time I checked the average HN user still thought TikTok was about dancing teens

I think it’s more that no “good” domain names are left. I grabbed my domain name 20+ years ago and still had to choose the like 20th choice.

Trying to make regular people find a free domain and pay $10-35 per year forever is a tough sell. Especially since when I die, my descendants will likely not renew my domain name so someone else could start using.

I like that some sites support domain names as ids but think it can only be optional.

I’d rather just have governments issue a unique id that serves as a public key, non-sensitive id that proves I’m me and I can link to lots of other services. To show that “heiwudhdbsbwjeh” is prepend on HN and whatever on twitter and anything I want to link there.

So rather than harmonizing names everywhere just make linking ids any time I want people to link really easy.

And maybe offer “vanity plates” where I could pay extra to claim, temporarily, prepend.usid or whatever to use instead of heiwudhdbsbwjeh.usid (and prepend.usid will just CNAME to this).

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